Study of the railway vocabulary in the speech of former Guarani railroad workers of Paraguay. First part.

Abstract

Based on a corpus created from the transcription of recorded conversations with former railroad workers in Paraguay, all of them monolingual speakers of Guaraní, we study in this article -first part of two installments- the main phenomena of transfer from Spanish to Guarani in the railroad field. We note that, even under a condition of evident disadvantage of the aboriginal language in a technical field such as railroads, it has shown, however, to maintain its main properties in terms of sound, form and syntactic arrangement in the borrowings it has incorporated from Spanish. Empirical evidence that speakers, regardless of their degree of knowledge of the grammatical theories of the language, or the pressure of the environment, produce discourse while preserving the fundamental elements of the language, can help in the planning of the Guarani language and thus advance its long-awaited modernization in Paraguay.